Book contents
- American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
- Nineteenth-Century American Literature In Transition
- American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Form and Genre
- Chapter 2 The Law of Form and the Form of the Law
- Chapter 3 The Statesman’s Address
- Chapter 4 Vocabularies and Other Indigenous-Language Texts
- Chapter 5 The Genteel Novel in the Early United States
- Chapter 6 The State of Our Union
- Chapter 7 “To assume her Language as my own”
- Chapter 8 “Ambiguities and Little Secrets”
- Part II Networks
- Part III Methods for Living
- Index
Chapter 5 - The Genteel Novel in the Early United States
from Part I - Form and Genre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2022
- American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
- Nineteenth-Century American Literature In Transition
- American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Form and Genre
- Chapter 2 The Law of Form and the Form of the Law
- Chapter 3 The Statesman’s Address
- Chapter 4 Vocabularies and Other Indigenous-Language Texts
- Chapter 5 The Genteel Novel in the Early United States
- Chapter 6 The State of Our Union
- Chapter 7 “To assume her Language as my own”
- Chapter 8 “Ambiguities and Little Secrets”
- Part II Networks
- Part III Methods for Living
- Index
Summary
This essay explores the novel’s vexed position within the emergent genteel culture of the early United States. It charts a broad transformation in the genre’s status between the 1780s and 1820s as the novel gradually becomes widely, if unevenly, accepted as respectable, even edifying, reading material. In tracing this shift, the essay explores how certain novelists of this period sought to establish the respectability of their own novels in part by distancing their works from the novel genre’s association with aristocratic frivolity. In this, these novels exemplify the early republic’s conflicted attitude toward gentility as such. The essay argues that these novels played an important role in this era’s more general recasting of gentility as bourgeois respectability rather than aristocratic fashionableness. The prevailing social and political conservatism of these novels, however, should not obscure the sustained literary experiment they undertook in reimagining the social meaning of the novel in the early United States.
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- Information
- American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 , pp. 75 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022